Images: Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution
Provincetown’s History Told Through Artifacts
by Steve Desroches
Ever since Charles Hawthorne founded the Cape Cod School of Art in 1899, establishing Provincetown as an art colony to this day, the Outer Cape has been the subject of an immense list of artistic works. But it isn’t just the sweeping landscapes and ocean views that have been documented on canvas, in photographs, on the page and the stage, but also it’s the people. If you hang around long enough, or especially if you were born and raised in Provincetown, chances are that you will end up in a work of art someday. Such was the case for Provincetown native son Antone Jason “Tony” Avellar, who in 1918 just may have had one of the most recognizable faces in the United States.
Gerrit Beneker was working as an illustrator in New York City when he came to Provincetown in 1912 to study under Hawthorne. Within a few years Beneker and his wife Flora would settle in Provincetown before moving to Truro in 1920. While in Provincetown, the Benekers lived at 210 Bradford Street (where the Summer of Sass is now housed), and their daughter Helen was born in 1918. In that year, Beneker was hired by the federal government to create posters to help sell war bonds as the United States entered World War I the previous year. Beneker began searching for models to sit to create the original works that would go on to become the Victory Liberty Loan posters. Shortly thereafter he met Avellar, a machinist who also ran a gasoline and oil company servicing the town’s fishing fleet. He was also a jovial guy, who liked to chat and was friendly to all. Beneker asked Avellar to model for him, and indeed the rest is history. Avellar (who was an uncle of current Provincetown Town Moderator Mary Jo Avellar) became the figure of the American worker in Beneker’s poster ,“Sure! We’ll Finish the Job,” which sold over three million copies and raised almost $5 billion for the war effort, becoming an iconic image of the day. And it made Avellar a local celebrity. The Boston Daily Post, owned by the Grozier family who lived at 160 Commercial Street, now commonly called the Cabral Mansion, wrote in 1919: “Best of all, Tony lives up to his poster, which typifies the substantial true American—the hard-working, salt-of-the-earth family man whose generous spirit reaches outside his family circle to help the nation.”
As coincidence would have it, Avellar and his first wife Marthe bought 210 Bradford Street, where he would live until his death in 1961 at the age of 75. In his life he was a real Provincetown bon vivant, befriending many in the town’s literary circles, including Sinclair Lewis, Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, and John Dos Passos. The original painting featured in the famed poster is in the art collection of the U.S. Department of Treasury in Washington, D.C. With so many posters in circulation, original copies exist in numerous collections, everywhere from the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (of which Beneker was a founding member) to the Library of Congress, and this one from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. The photo of Beneker and Avellar is from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, where his papers ended up over 40 years after his death from an embolism in 1934 at his home in Truro at the age of 51.
